Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action in University Admissions

In 4-3 ruling, court advises schools to continuously review race-based policies.

A divided Supreme Court Thursday upheld racial preferences in public-university admissions, a defeat to a yearslong conservative drive to roll back affirmative action.

Writing for a 4-3 court, Justice Anthony Kennedy found that the University of Texas at Austin’s challenged plan passed constitutional muster because it was designed in a narrow way to improve diversity on campus. The school’s plan considered race as an additional factor when evaluating certain black and Hispanic applicants.

Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said universities are defined by “intangible qualities…which make for greatness.”

“Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission,” Justice Kennedy wrote in a 20-page opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented, saying the court’s decision was “remarkably wrong,” and at odds with a 2013 high court decision in an earlier chapter of the same case.

The university relied upon “unsupported and noxious racial assumptions” and “never provided any coherent explanation for its asserted need to discriminate on the basis of race,” Justice Alito wrote in the dissent. He read portions of it from the bench, signaling the intensity of his disagreement.

The decision came from a court with two vacant seats—one left by the February death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, another by the recusal of liberal Justice Elena Kagan, who as the Obama administration’s solicitor general had participated in the case at earlier stages to support the university’s position.

The case was the fourth time since the 1970s that the court has upheld racial preferences in college admissions, albeit with restrictions against numerical quotas or rigid set-asides for minorities. Justice Kennedy said universities must continually review their affirmative-action policies to assess their “positive and negative” effects, and to determine if they are still needed—a statement that leaves the door open to future legal challenges.

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